Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

“Chomsky and his coauthors argue that machine learning  — the discipline behind generative AI and other powerful algorithms — will ‘degrade our science and debase our ethics by incorporating into our technology a fundamentally flawed conception of language and knowledge.’ Chomsky has been fighting against this particular conception since the 1950s, so it’s not a surprise that he thinks it’s problematic for it to be released commercially. It’s less clear that his particular blend of cognitive science and politics can truly account for what ChatGPT and similar systems are up to . A competing  op-ed  from the  Wall Street Journal  penned by now deceased Henry Kissinger — a generational Chomsky nemesis — and coauthors argued that ChatGPT was as important a step as the printing press, with similarly wide-ranging implications for policy, foreign and domestic, and the status of knowledge. In a weird way, Chomsky actually agrees with t...

“In my opinion, nothing has contributed so much to the corruption of the original idea of Socialism as the belief that Russia is a Socialist country.” —George Orwell, Preface to the Ukrainian edition of Animal Farm George Orwell

Orwell's 1984 : why it still matters

Stephen Rosen: “[W]hat is nationalism? And what nationalism is actually Western invention. Imperial China had no nationalism. Where do they get their ideas of nationalism? Well, they got their ideas of nationalism from the Japanese, which emerged as a national state in the 19 [century].  Well, where did the Japanese get their ideas about nationalism, which were then translated into Chinese? They got it from the Germans. So what they imported was a 19th-century version of social Darwinism in which race  is of the fundamental basis of nationality and there are very – when you hear Xi Jinping [a communist/Marxist?] and other Chinese leaders talking about cultural pollution, when you talk about the natural affinity of all Chinese people wherever they are, you begin to worry that there is this submerged, and sometimes not even so, some racialist component.” — The historian Lord Acton put  the case against "nationalism as insanity" in 1862. Bertrand Russell  criticizes n...

Then as now I align myself with Orwell's pessimism. "To the British working class, Orwell argued, the massacre of their comrades in Vienna, Berlin, or Madrid had seemed less worthy of their consideration than 'yesterday’s football match.' Even more disappointing to him was the total lack of solidarity that the English working class had shown for “colored” workers in the colonies." Today, despite a tremendous global flow of information of what is happening elsewhere, Orwell's pessimism has an echo when one looks at the extent of the working classes passivity in the "West" before the plunder, inequality, exploitation and ‘Islamophobia’ at home and people's struggle during the Arab uprisings or barbarism in Syrian and Myanmar. " Orwell’s late collaboration with the propaganda apparatus of Western imperialism is a sad, regrettable, and inexcusable fact." I think the following is a good assessment of Orwell. Geroge Orwell and the ...

We willingly buy the screens that are used against us "willingly"? 

Someone has advised me not to feel guilty by living in Britain. Here is an answer: "I was in the Indian Police five years, and by the end of that time I hated the imperialism I was serving with bitterness which I probably cannot make clear. In the free air of England that kind of thing is not fully intelligible. In order to hate imperialism you have got to be part of it." — George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier Orwell had his reasons at the time. I have my different reasons today. The fundamental remains: Britain is an imperialist state and I am part of it.

"It is the peculiar fate of oppressed people everywhere that when they are killed, they are killed twice: first by bullet or bomb, and next by the language used to describe their deaths . A common condition of oppression, after all, is to be blamed for being the victim, and that blame gets meted out in language designed to rob the oppressed of their very struggle."

"Scientific education for the masses will do little good, and probably a lot of harm, if it simply boils down to more physics, more chemistry, more biology, etc to the detriment of literature and history. Its probable effect on the average human being would be to narrow the range of his thoughts and make him more than ever contemptuous of such knowledge as he did not possess."  Orwell,  What is Science , 1945

The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them. —George Orwell

“A people that elect corrupt politicians, imposters, thieves and traitors are not victims... but accomplices” George Orwell

Orwell and the language of dystopia